Introducing the Student Hub—Where Udacity Students and Mentors Share Experiences and Resources

By Carolin Steurer October 10, 2018

Start exploring the fully-immersive learning experience now available in the Udacity classroom!

We know it takes dedication and courage to learn new skills and explore new career opportunities. We are committed to providing you with all the resources and support you need to achieve your learning goals and advance your career.

That’s why, today, we are launching the new Student Hub experience to all of our existing and new students. The Student Hub provides you with an effective way to connect with fellow students and receive support and guidance from knowledgeable mentors.

Our goal in launching this new experience is to help you acquire valuable and in-demand skills, and to successfully complete your challenging Nanodegree programs. These are intensive programs, and as you proceed through your curriculum, you’ll need to set ambitious goals, and achieve important milestones. We’re excited to offer new resources that will help you do exactly that.

We’ve had hundreds of conversations with students about their mentorship and community experience at Udacity. We’ve analyzed years of data to understand which behaviors produced the most successful outcomes for our students. We’ve experimented, iterated, tested, and trialed a whole range of solutions. And we’ve created something really special for you. Today marks the culmination of a company-wide effort to offer a powerful new set of resources that will help support your learning goals, and power your success.

Here are some of the valuable early learnings we gathered as we designed the Student Hub:

Students successfully complete projects 20% faster—students with access to the Student Hub prototype took a median of 14 days to submit and pass a project, whereas students without access took more than 18 days.

Students benefit from interacting with mentors and fellow classmates who have specific and shared experience with the project they are currently working on.

Students feel more connected to their community and to their program when they can easily and consistently read topical conversations, and send and respond to relevant messages. Our most recent data shows that 91% of students with access to community features are watching conversations, with 45% of the same students actively participating in messaging.

Valuable findings such as these directly informed the process of creating the fully-immersive classroom experience—Student Hub—that is now accessible right from your classroom! Student Hub features two distinct areas: Guided Study and Community.

Guided Study: Mentorship for all Nanodegree program students

At Udacity, you learn by working on real-world projects, and your student projects get reviewed by hundreds of qualified mentor-reviewers stationed around the world. With the benefit of their actionable feedback, you successfully complete your projects, and advance through the curriculum.

Completing projects is an extremely rewarding experience for Udacity students, and mentorship has been one of the proven ways Udacity has helped students through the challenge of submitting and completing projects.

We have offered a range of mentorship environments and services as part of the Udacity experience, and each iteration has served to reinforce the importance of mentorship to the learning process. These evolutions have also provided valuable student feedback to help identify areas where our mentorship services can support positive student outcomes in new and powerful ways. It was this feedback that led to the vision for our new Guided Study—an experience that prioritizes immediate access to support resources, and high-quality responses to student queries.

In the Guided Studyenvironment, mentors are available to provide tips, help, and guidance. For instance, if you’re struggling with overcoming an error in your project, you can post a question, and ask for assistance by @-mentioning your classmates and mentors. Because mentors are also project reviewers, they can provide detailed and actionable feedback. Each mentor possesses high-value knowledge about the concepts, tools, and techniques that are relevant to a given project.

Use Guided Study to interact with mentors, and complete projects

You will always find one dedicated channel for each individual project in your Nanodegree program. In that dedicated channel, where you and your fellow classmates all have the same deadline, you can ask questions and share tips on how to successfully complete the project on time. At least two mentors will be in each channel to help you. All students are able to ask questions directly via @-mentions, and these in turn trigger email notifications to mentors, who can reach back out to students with the necessary answers.

We are excited to make it easier for you to access mentorships services. Based on data from the past two years of providing a mentorship experience, we’ve seen that students who engage with our mentors submit their project work approximately 20% faster!

We will continue to track mentor activity and response-times, monitor student satisfaction scores, and interact directly with our whole community to ensure that we maintain high levels of service quality. We believe all of our students should get the support you need, when you need it.

Guided Study and Knowledge: A powerful combination to support your learning

The Udacity Knowledge platform is a moderated forum that allows you to search for, post, and answer questions from other students and alumni from around the world.

Use Knowledge and Guided Study together for maximum learning efficiency

How do Knowledge and Guided Study work together? Within the Student Hub experience, you can discuss questions, then post and share in Knowledge, making everything searchable and beneficial for all future students. You can also post a question in Knowledge, then link that question in the Student Hub to see if anyone can answer it there.

Knowledge and Guided Study work together to allow you to learn in whatever format suits you best. Because some students prefer to search for answers in a traditional forum format vs. an interactive, live conversation, we’ve made it possible for you to switch back and forth between these two options, depending on your preferences, and the specific item you’re looking for help on (ex: a simple question vs. a more complex, multi-question issue).

Community: Interacting with lifelong learners and educators across the globe

Learning with Udacity means you are part of a thriving, global student community, and the Student Hub is open and available for students worldwide to connect, interact, network, and share insights and experience. Students can connect informally, or participate in community events such as regular AMAs (Ask-Me-Anything) with industry professionals and Udacity experts. These AMAs will cover everything from how to land your dream job, to applying Nanodegree program knowledge in a technical interview, and more.

Inaugural AMAs with Sebastian Thrun

First up on the Student Hub community agenda, our very own Sebastian Thrun will be chatting with School of Autonomous Systems students on October 17th! More school-specific opportunities can be found below (with even more to come):

School of Autonomous Systems on October 17th at 9:30am PT

School of AI on October 31st at 9:30am PT

School of Data Science on October 31st at 12:30pm PT

School of Programming on Nov 1st at 12:00pm PT

To chat with Sebastian during these AMAs, just open the Student Hub in your classroom at the times specified above. If you live in a timezone in which it’s challenging to participate, all the sessions will be recorded and available afterward within Student Hub.

The Student Hub on mobile: Community-powered learning, where and when you need it

We know that when you receive an answer from a mentor or fellow students, you may not be sitting in front of your computer. That’s why Student Hub is also available in the Udacity app for iOS and Android! Download the app today, and experience the power of community whenever and wherever you need it!

The Student Hub is designed to support you as you learn new skills, achieve important goals, and accomplish great things in your life and career. You can draw on the power of community and mentorship to get answers when you need them, overcome challenges when they stand in your way, and get inspired when you need a lift to reach the next level of success.

Open your classroom today, and start connecting with an extraordinary global community of learners and educators.